Race is elsewhere: state-socialist ideology and the racialisation of Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

Current literature sees expressions of popular racism in twentieth-century European state-socialist societies either as directly deriving from the official ideology of the state or else as happening despite it. This article argues that the ways in which Vietnamese workers were racialised in 1980s Czechoslovakia were neither directly derived from the state’s official ideology, nor did they arise in opposition to that ideology. Instead, it suggests that they are more usefully seen as reworkings of certain elements of the state’s official ideology. Most important among those elements were: the insistence that racism did not exist in Czechoslovakia; the centrality of ‘honest socialist work’; and the conception of the overseas foreign workers programme as a socialist civilising mission of sorts. In most cases, some or all of these notions worked in tandem, and, moreover, also built upon existing discourses in regard to the Roma.